from the gout. Pain in the legs - he will bring me to him to end the pain in his iegs. For the pain, he'll teach me all he knows. Anything to remove the pain.
The healing ended. Calvin walked away, as usual. To his surprise, however, the secret policeman left by quite another route. Shouldn't he follow me? Whisper to me that the Emperor needs me? Would I come and serve the Emperor? Oh, but I'm not sure I can be of help. I do what I can, but many wounds are stubborn and refuse to be fully healed, Oh, that's right, Calvin meant to promise nothing. Let his deeds speak for themselves. He would make the Emperor's leg feel better for a while - he was sure he could do that - but no one would ever be able to say that Calvin Miller had promised that the healing would be permanent, or even that there would be any kind of healing at all.
But he had no chance to say these things, for the secret policeman went another way.
That evening, as he waited for his supper at the cafe, four gendarmes came into the cafe, laughing as if they had just come off duty. Two went toward the kitchen - apparently they knew someone there - while the other two jostled, clumsy and laughing, among the tables. Calvin smiled a moment and then looked out the window.
The laughing stopped. Harsh hands seized his arms and lifted him out of his chair. All four gendarmes were around him now, not laughing at all. They bound his wrists together and hobbled his legs. Then they half-dragged him from the cafe.
It was astonishing. It was impossible. This had to be a response to the report of the secret policeman. But why would they arrest him? What law had he broken? Was it simply that he spoke English? Surely they understood the difference between an Englishman and an American. The English were still at war with France, or something like war, anyway, but the Americans were neutral, more or less. How dare they?
For a moment, painfully hobbling along with the gendarmes at the too-brisk pace they set for him, Calvin toyed with the idea of using his Makering power to loose the bonds and stand free of them. But they were all armed, and Calvin had no desire to tempt them to use their weapons against an escaping prisoner.
Nor did he waste effort, after the first few minutes, trying to persuade them that some terrible mistake was underway. What was the point? They knew who he was; someone had told them to arrest him; what did they care whether it was a mistake or not? It wasn't their mistake.
Half an hour later, he found himself stripped and thrown into a miserable stinking cell in the Bastille.
"Welcome to the Land of the Guillotine!" croaked someone farther up the corridor. "Welcome, 0 pilgrim, to the Shrine of the Holy Blade!"
"Shut up!" cried another man.
"They sliced through another man's neck today, the one who was in the cell you're in now, new boy! That's what happens to Englishmen here in Paris, once somebody decides that you're a spy."
"But I'm not English!" Calvin cried out.
This was greeted with gales of laughter.
* * *
Peggy set down her pen in weariness, closed her eyes in disgust. Wasn't there some kind of plan here? The One who sent Alvin into the world, who protected him and prepared him for the great work of building the Crystal City, didn't that One have some kind of plan? Or was there no plan? No, there had to be some meaning in the fact that this very day, in Paris, Calvin was locked up in prison, just as Alvin was in prison in Hatrack River. The Bastille, of course, was a far cry from a second-story room in the back of the courthouse, but jail was jail - they were both locked in, for no good reason, and with no idea of how it would all come out.
But Peggy knew. She saw all the paths. And, finally, she closed up her pen, put away the papers she had been writing on, And got up to tell her hosts that she would have to leave earlier than she expected. "I'm needed elsewhere, I think."
* * *
Bonaparte's nephew was a weasel who thought he was an ermine. Well, let him have his delusion. If men didn't have delusions, Bonaparte wouldn't